Features
- Earn free costume items by leveling up (Progress / Prizes)
- "Stats" page renamed to "Progress"
- New "Prizes" page
- Player rank displayed in match lobby and title on match scoreboard
- Click and drag to rotate your character in the Store and Role Customization
- Display time until your ship respawns during death cam
- Community Ambassadors and beta players now have a badge showing in stats
- Differentiated Use / Jump key bindings from Leave Gun, Leave Helm keys

Balance
- Speed of capturing points increases as more allies are at a capture point. Number of ships at capture point is also displayed.
- Resources earned on Resource Race increases as you capture more points
- Additional capture point added to King of Flayed Hills to a total of 5 captures points
- Tweaked sizes and positioning of captures points in King of Flayed Hills and Anglean Raiders due to tweaks in capture time and resources earned amount.
- Spawn point repositioning in Anglean Raiders and King of Flayed Hills due to capture point changes.
- Slight increase to Shatter damage on Artemis Light Rocket Launcher as well as slightly increased rate of fire.
- “Secret Hole” in Scrap on the Dunes has been plugged for good! If you didn’t know about it before, I’m sorry, but you’ve missed your chance to camp the hole.

Fixes
- Networking: fixed a bug that could cause “ghost” copies of ships to be left behind after death
- Networking: fixed a bug that could cause the “death cam” transition to be skipped
- Performance: server-side networking and AI optimization to reduce frequency of slow-time incidents in large games on loaded servers
- Rendering: fixed some rare specular highlight artifacts
- Gameplay: Tar Barrel now spawns Smog Clouds further behind your ship as to not damage your own engines. Smog Cloud damage increased to 12 Shatter damage per second from 7.
- Gameplay : Spire ladder fixed, both while trying to grab onto the ladder, and getting stuck in the shaft while falling.
- Display: Time after ship death spent fading to and from black reduced, time spent orbiting in death cam increased
- Display: Dual-barrel muzzle flash appears on the correct barrel
- After customizing in Look, and then change gender, the items now reflect the gender change correctly
- Ship naming now has proper display
- Fixed unending wind effect after match

Art
- Added hanging lanterns to the interior of the Spire, making it easier to navigate
- General ship polish and optimization
- General map polish and optimization
- Costume polish
- UI polish

Known Issues
- Display: Character name tags and models will sometimes persist in mid-air after ship death
- Display: Your character will try to play the Use Equipment animation when you switch to the scope on the helm.
- Display: You will see the third person scope mesh on the helm when you switch from a skill then back to the scope.

We’re holding a screenshot contest from now till <b>Monday December 17th</b> to see your best screenshots in these categories:

*3rd Person (Show us you doing your best at the helm, at the guns or keeping your ship from falling apart from a 3rd person perspective.)
*Spectator Mode (Be the guy on the sidelines that catches the best shots from the best matches.)
*Captain and Crew (Gives us a screenshot that shows off the captain and crew of your ship at their best.)
*Fjords (Show us your best screenshots set in the new map, Fjords.)
*Free-For-All (Show us your best screenshot of whatever suits your aviator fancy.)

Email your entries to <a href="mailto:feedback@musegames.com">feedback@musegames.com&lt;/a> with the subject line “GoI Screenshot Contest” and let us know in the email which categories you’re submitting your screenshots for. There is a <b>limit of 2</b> screenshots per category. On Monday, all the entries will be posted on the <a href="http://www.facebook.com/GunsOfIcarusOnline">Guns of Icarus Online Facebook page</a>, and voting begins, where Likes will be counted for your votes. The Muse Team will then judge the top-voted screenshots in each category to decide the winners.

Winners will be announced on <b>Thursday December 20th</b>. Each winner will receive a choice of one of the following outfits so you’ll be looking good when you’re manning your ship in the skies.

Features
- New users now have one week to verify their email address.
- UI: more colors, highlighting yourself and blackening blocked players.
- UI: game list displays captain counts / slots
- “Death cam”: Camera orbits the site of last ship death while respawning
- Added display and filtering of server location to match list
- Added ability to select preferred location at match creation time
- Added pregame match chat
- Global lobby chat moved to Steam group chat

Balance
- Field Gun has a decreased turn speed, rate of fire, turn radius, as well as an increased reload time and slight drop. No changes to damage have been made.
- Rocket Launcher has an increased rate of fire.
- Squid has a major boost in top speed, from 37m/s to approximately 47m/s. This should bring back kiting back and make the Squid a viable support ship.
- Discrepancy between intended balance and database numbers found. Should mitigate Carronade issues
-- Squid should have had 850 armor instead of 700
-- Flechette modifier against armor should be 0.2 instead of 0.4
-- Light Carronade should have slightly slower rate of fire and slightly longer reload time

Bug Fixes
- Stats and achievements are no longer tracked in Sandbox.
- Achievements requiring you to do something to targets that are inside a cloud now can be progressed.
- Store purchase errors caused by Steam declining transactions are now displayed to users.
- UI: player information popup refreshes automatically on rank info update.
- UI: running matches now correctly display ship names / classes.
- AI: disconnected players will now be replaced by AI crew on ship death / respawn.
- Fire Extinguisher no longer rebuilds destroyed components.
- Fixed some performance problems (sudden framerate drops) with ship deaths
- Fixed an issue with Steam integration that could cause voice bugs and possibly crash very high-end machines.

Known Bugs
- Certain routers are known to corrupt the game’s traffic, in particular the Linksys WRT54G line. We are working on a more permanent fix, but bypassing your router should work around the problem.

Hi everyone, in rough stormy circumstances, we weren't able to get to as many fixes and goodies as we would have liked, but in the spirit of helping with Sandy Relief, especially in light of the new storm, we're getting the special items in tonight. Help us to help those in need. The build goes live tonight, and here are the release notes:

NEW
- Added “Nightingale Cap” and “Dr. Schnabel Mask” items to the store. All proceeds from the sale of these items will be donated to Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

FIXED
- Fixed a bug that would cause player input bindings to be reset
- Fixed a bug with switching tools while using the spyglass
- Fixed some client performance issues that could cause connection problems
- Removed (confusing and unused) player score values from match scoreboard
- Fixed instances of slow ship and slow time in matches
- Resolved an issue in which games would not start on EU instances

A note on known bugs:
We’re in the midst of testing and fixing a number of known issues, including the “freeze on match end” bug and improvements to general connection stability. Unfortunately, our ability to do this is still severely limited by the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy: our office has had no internet or heat this week, so we’re all coordinating remotely. Since many of these fixes have potentially far-reaching and subtle effects, we also want to make sure they work properly and don’t break anything else; a forthcoming server patch will address them.

Thank you for your patience and support during this rough launch window. It already started off pretty crazy with Total Biscuit's great video coverage on the game pushing a huge influx of players into our servers. What we've managed to do to combat the lag is to increase overall power for our database servers by several folds.

Unfortunately, I can't get you all the details because our engineers are without power right now. Hurricane Sandy is tearing up the Northeastern seaboard here in the US so there's not a whole lot of support we can offer. We have a few guys in Taiwan that will brace for impact when they wake up but our team is short-staffed and there are still a lot of things to fix.

So thanks again for your support and patience through this. We'll be back at 120% once the storm subsides a little bit more. And to our friends in the area, stay safe and stay dry!

---- This post will be updated with the latest status as we get news. ----

---- Much of the Muse team has started to lose internet access as Sandy has its way with NYC, so please forgive us if we take a little longer than usual to respond! ----

Servers are back up!

Costume and soundtrack DLC: If you got the Collector's Edition and don't have the soundtrack or costume pack yet, or still have the "Pre-Order" item in your library in addition to the game, not to worry, we have word from Steam that they'll take care of it. Their beta-to-launch transition process is still a little rocky, but your items are coming!

Halloween masks: After rescuing a machine from our office in flooded downtown Manhattan and lugging it to a temporary workspace uptown, we're working on rolling out the update to add in the free Halloween masks. Since we couldn't get them out earlier today we're extending the time they'll be available, and you can get them for free all week long!

Can't purchase in store: Currently the in-game store is not able to accept payment in currency other than USD. We apologize and are working on a fix for this!

Registration confirmation e-mails: Due to high capacity, the e-mail server may take a little while to send your confirmation code after you register. They do seem to be getting through, but there may be a bit of a delay before you receive it.

Forever loading matches: If you're seeing a spinning propeller when you try to start a match (after successfully logging into the game), we've tracked this problem to a VPN solution called LogMeIn Hamachi, which is improperly forwarding server requests so you can't connect. If you have this installed and are having problems connecting to matches, for now we recommend that you simply uninstall it, but we're working on a longer-term solution!

Its not an easy life, but theres nothing else like it. Plenty of folks like yourself have decided to slip the surly bonds of earth and take to the skies after hearing tales of bold Captains, fearless Gunners, and cunning Engineers and their high-flying exploits. Think you have what it takes to join their ranks?

Raising the stakes on team-based PvP combat with an emphasis on strategic competition and truly cooperative play, Guns of Icarus Online is the premier airship combat game thats all about teamwork, tactics, and fast-paced action. With a good ship and the right crew, you can conquer the skies!